Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Dotterel: Steno for Android!

Dotterel, a new steno keyboard for Android, was released a few days ago. (GIF above courtesy of lead dev Ted.) We've had StenoIME available for several years, but it hasn't been in development for quite some time, and has always had a number of issues that made it difficult to use. Dotterel, by community member Nimble, has greatly improved on the idea, and I find it to be a lovely swipe-style steno keyboard interface. On my rather small phone, it works best in landscape mode, though on a tablet portrait would probably be just fine. You can swipe, tap, or use a physical keyboard using a USB-on-the-go adapter, and it has quite a bit of clever context sensing that allows for accurate error correction and jumping between text fields without messing up your translation. Feel free to download it and play around with it, and if you have any suggestions on ways it can be improved, contribute to the issues thread on Nimble's Github.

1 comment:

This is amazing. I have been suffering from medial epicondylitis, also known as golfer's elbow, and have to limit my use of the keyboard as much as possible until I recover. The unfortunate thing is that I am a programmer, and I can't fully stop typing.

I want to pick up steno when I have recovered, and this is giving me the option of practicing the basics.